A matter of principal

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Face value ... John Marsden and his dog Coco at Fitzroy Community School where he teaches one day a week.Photo: Cathryn Tremain

To find what makes a great school, look no further than the staff,
says award-winning children's author and teacher John Marsden.

A school with its own food court? Jakarta International School
has one, in the middle of the campus. At lunchtime you decide
whether you want KFC or noodles, pizza or sandwiches, and step up
to the counter you've chosen.

In good years the school has up to 3000 students, whose parents
pay about $US20,000 ($25,400) for them to attend, giving the
principal an annual budget of $US60 million.

Jakarta International has its own hospital and ambulance, and
has just put in a $1 million running track, but the downside is the
massive security fence, the bomb threats, and the guards with
mirrors on poles, checking cars before they enter.

Fitzroy Community School, in Melbourne, has 55 students. Lunch
is a communal affair. No one brings it from home. Instead, food
fresh from Queen Victoria Market is spread on tables, and staff and
students graze, making salads or toasted sandwiches or
salami-and-cheese rolls.

Food isn't everything. But if Napoleon's army marched on its
stomach, kids learn on theirs. How warmly I remember Flemington
Secondary College, where a free breakfast was served daily to
disadvantaged kids by a lovely woman who worked almost full-time
for no wages.

To see what a school's really like, look at the peripheral
stuff. Anyone can write a lovely statement of aims and objectives;
every school can put together a trip to Japan or a climb in
Kashmir; every school's got some kid who's represented Australia in
lacrosse or won a scholarship to the Defence Force Academy; and
every school has a pair of nice, articulate kids to take you on a
guided tour.

None of this means anything. Appearances are the least important
criteria. An expensive new reception area is to be regarded with
grave suspicion. Check the real things. Watch what happens at the
canteen during recess, investigate the condition of the dunnies,
see how much eye contact there is between students and staff as
they move from class to class.

Go into the staffroom at lunchtime. Is there a sense of unity,
positive energy? What's in the fridge? What's on the noticeboard?
Just boring circulars from the Education Department and a list of
absentees?

You can't always specify what makes a school great. It's the
vibe. I know when I go into Melbourne's Princes Hill Secondary
College the air feels charged with creative energy.

The girls of Preston Girls Secondary College struck me as
empowered and motivated.

The broadcaster and author Keith Smith, who worked with children
for decades, claimed he could tell a good school by the way the
students responded when he asked for directions to the principal.
In a bad school, he said, the kids merely pointed to the office. In
a good school they took him there. But in a great school they led
him in and introduced him to the principal.

Presumptuously, I, too, feel I can pick up on the vibe pretty
quickly. Sometimes it's negative, a terrible bleakness, a lack of
soul. The kids look unloved, uncared for. There's shabby buildings
and furniture and an unhealthy amount of litter.

I've been to 3000 schools, and for a few hours or days or weeks
have got "inside" each of them, by taking workshops and chatting to
staff and students. If I were giving out gongs, the first I'd call
to the stage would be Fitzroy Community School, where I teach two
days a week. The students spend almost as much time playing as they
do working, yet their academic standards are higher than at almost
any primary school I've seen.

Woodleigh School, at Baxter, near Frankston in Melbourne's
south-east, has beautiful native gardens.

The students go on a mini-bushwalk as they move around the
campus. Woodleigh is alive with the sound of music. So many
students are into jazz and blues and classical music and rock that
the whole place hums.

No school will suit every one of its students, and some are so
deeply unhappy that no school will work for them. But the best
schools are way ahead of the worst ones. My own theory is that
leadership is the biggest factor. I've seen a bad principal destroy
a good school in less than a year.

I've seen a great principal turn a bad school around in a couple
of weeks.

It's frightening that so much can depend upon one individual,
but it needn't be that way. Some years ago, an incompetent
principal was put in charge of a Melbourne private school. A group
of senior staff decided that they loved the school too much to let
it fall apart, so they effectively took over, running the place in
a purposeful and efficient way while the principal played
noughts-and-crosses, occasionally wandered through the staffroom
looking for a coffee, and made speeches to the parents about the
fine education their children were getting.

Keith Smith's criterion for determining the quality of a school
seems a little old-fashioned now. But it does give a sense of the
importance of the principal-student relationship. Years ago at a
primary school in Bendigo, the principal and I set out to cross the
playground, to get to the library. Recess was just starting. It
took us the full 20 minutes to traverse 100 metres, because every
kid in the place wanted to say "hi" to the principal, have a chat,
tell him what was going on in their lives.

One of our recurring follies as humans is to imagine we can
construct foolproof systems. We think that if we have enough rules
or policies or regulations or statements of intention or procedure
manuals, we will create a situation where nothing can go wrong.

I've noticed that teachers who bring school groups to my place
for writing camps fall into two categories. There are the ones who
ring up, email and fax 20 or 30 times beforehand, making sure that
every detail is taken into account, and that they and we have
provided for every eventuality.

Then there are the ones who ring up to make the booking, have a
bit of a chat about what's involved, maybe ring back a week or two
beforehand to confirm final details, and arrive on the day with
their students. The funny thing is that there's no difference
between the groups when it comes to results. The first teacher is
as likely as the second to have forgotten to mention the child with
diabetes, or to have left the cheque at home, or to have brought
tea towels instead of pillowcases.

It doesn't really matter what policies a school develops, what
routines it has in place, what ideals it professes. In the end it's
the principal and the teachers who determine what works and what
doesn't.

For example, many schools have tried the Uninterrupted Sustained
Silent Reading program, where everyone from principal to junior
student reads for 20 minutes a day. In some schools this results in
a wonderful reading community, but in others the 20 minutes is just
a restless, disorganised waste of time. You can never legislate for
human laziness, human destructiveness, human stupidity.

My first teaching job was at All Saints College, Bathurst, in
1979. Staff talked with awe about the previous principal, Peter
Gebhardt, who, they said, had a simple employment policy. His
tactic was to seek out the most interesting, passionate, creative
teachers, put them all in the school together, and tell them to get
on with it. The result was an explosion of positive energy that
still reverberated through the school long after Gebhardt had left
to go to Geelong College.

Well, I'm putting my money where my mouth is, and starting a
school next year, and yes, it will be perfect. Anyone who starts a
school with an aim other than perfection should not be allowed to
enter the premises.

I'm lucky in that I've got 485 hectares of beautiful bush and
gardens for a campus 45 minutes from Melbourne. That's not a bad
start. I'm a big fan of beauty. I firmly believe that exposing
children and adolescents to beauty and surrounding them with it all
day, every day, is a good beginning.

But our students will learn that the creation (sometimes) and
the maintenance of beauty does not come free. I like the Timbertop
idea of students working to maintain the school's buildings and
grounds.

Our school will be an "inside out" school which has interaction
with the community. I want students out in the world, learning how
it works, trying to come to an understanding of this society. And I
want the world to come pouring in through the front gates:
professors and refugees and comedians and gravediggers and judges
and computer nerds and nurses.

Perhaps most importantly, I want the main influence on young
people to be adults, not their peers.

I was startled the other day to be told by my grade 4 teacher,
now in her 80s, that we'd had 48 children in that classroom. I have
no doubt that in another generation people will be equally
astonished and disbelieving when told that, in 2005, schools had 30
or so students in a classroom.

When a teacher is in a classroom with 30 students, the
mathematics of the situation ensures that a significant amount of
the learning about values and attitudes and behaviours will be
passed on from student to student, secretly transmitted around the
room like influenza.

A low staff-student ratio in itself guarantees nothing, because
the staff may be lazy or incompetent or destructive, but to get
good and interesting and creative and intelligent adults, and to
have so many of them that children are constantly interacting with
them, is a pretty good start towards achieving that mysterious and
elusive goal we call perfection.

We'll bus kids from Melbourne, but not in huge coaches. Daily
trips to the school will replicate family drives, with adults
engaging intelligently and positively with the children. (This
could actually be an improvement on some family drives.)

Meanwhile, I'm working on the menus, and can promise plenty of
fresh eggs from our chooks, vegies from our garden, and bickies
that our students will bake.